Visionary film giants left indelible mark

in appreciation

Decades before it was given a name, Michelangelo Antonioni recognized the malady we call attention-deficit disorder.

In his great 1960s films, L'Avventura, La Notte, Eclipse and Red Desert, but especially in L'Avventura, his masterpiece, it wasn't diagnosed as a chemical imbalance, but as a communicable social disease.

Spawned in a psychological petri dish in which idleness, boredom and dissatisfaction with the material rewards of life combined to create and spread a chronic, generalized, mild depression, it was an ailment peculiar to the upper-middle class.

What made audiences susceptible was the glamour that attached to it. As I watched his films' attractive aristocrats and climbers mope through their empty lives, a part of me wanted to be just like those people: self-absorbed and miserable, perhaps, but also fashionable and sexy.

Critic Pauline Kael recognized this contradiction in a famous essay, "Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties," which aroused the ire of Antonioni devotees such as myself. More than four decades later, that contradiction remains unresolved in popular culture. Such is the power of film and television imagery that glamour and sex, no matter how tawdry or morally bankrupt, command our attention and whet our fantasies.

Antonioni was the movies' first diagnostician of what back then was called alienation, anomie, angst and decadence.

If his films had their silly side (the image of Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, grappling fully clothed in a sand trap in La Notte), they were also prophetic. Their melancholy poetry transmuted an overriding mood of self-pity into something deeper and closer to tragedy.

Antonioni's death on Monday, so close to Ingmar Bergman's, should give us pause. Their deaths bring down the final curtain on the high-modernist era of filmmaking, when a handful of directors were artistic gods accorded the respect and latitude of great painters or authors. Antonioni was a sensuous aesthete who, when it suited him, resorted to painting nature the way he wanted it to look on the screen.

The meticulous compositions in Antonioni's films depict a shiny but flimsy new world displacing an older and more solid one. Classic stone architecture constructed to last for centuries is contrasted with bright, new high-rise skyscrapers without character.

Antonioni's vogue ended abruptly in 1970 with the critical and commercial failure of Zabriskie Point.

At the time, that movie, his first feature made in the United States, was widely misunderstood by fans longing to identify with its young lovers, who dabble in revolutionary politics.

When no revolution occurred at the end, the audience that had lined up to see it (I saw its first two New York screenings) left frustrated.

In hindsight, its climactic fantasy of a house repeatedly exploding (to the strains of Pink Floyd) predicted the imminent failure of that so-called revolution. The notion that it was just a fantasy was a message nobody wanted to hear.

But Antonioni's movement in and out of fashionableness shouldn't distract us from his accomplishment.

He was a visionary whose portrayal of the failure of Eros in a hyper-eroticized climate addressed the modern world and its discontents in a new, intensely poetic cinematic language.